Robot plays Angry Birds (or any other touchscreen app)

PyCon 2012 (a convention dedicated to the computer programming language Python) was held earlier this month in Santa Clara, CA, and one of the projects on display can be seen above. The "BitbeamBot" is a miniature robot that was designed to do one thing and one thing only: Play Angry Birds.

Well, that's not quite true -- it was designed to interact with touchscreen devices, in order to "test" any number of tasks usually considered too repetitive for humans. As the developer says in the video below, if this thing was really testing, you'd just design tasks for it to do over and over again through an SDK. But playing Angry Birds is fun to watch, and the robot's actually pretty good at it.

The original design for the robot was actually in Legos -- it's controlled with an Arduino and some homemade software. But eventually the creator decided to use Bitbeams for it, hence the bot's name. Very cool indeed. And I, for one, welcome our new Angry Birds-playing overlords.